Apply HN: xCollabr – gather collective potential

[konoufo]

Often teams/organizations don’t even notice how they have a lot to win in working together because of lack of information about what others have been doing and where they are going.

Our solution ..

Teams currently function as autonomous systems. Through our medium, we want to connect them and enable them to exchange information, discuss on issues affecting them and collaborate on joint initiatives, thereby creating the “Internet of teams”. A new team in an organization should have easy access to relevant institutional knowledge. We wish to enable this cross-pollination of ideas and practices while enforcing various levels of privacy and streamline the process by which tasks are delegated among teams.

Execution ..

We interviewed 18 student organizations leaders across three campus (including MIT) as part of our market research and when our beta version is complete, we plan to offer them a free trial. First we’ll build a webapp where teams can lay out their vision over some time cycle (e.g a semester for student organizations), visually manage each team member’s tasks, monitor progress, and connect with other teams sharing similar goals.

Team … I’m working on this with a co-founder, Aboubacar Karim. I have extensive experience developping webapps, and have been a co-founder at Airspress, an international peer-to-peer delivery service. Aboubacar Karim has a BA in agroeconomics and we’ve worked together on Airspress.

Vision…

We want to create huge transparent collaboration opportunities. So we consider including VR features in next iterations. These features could include live translation, whiteboards etc.

Differentiating factor: Our unique focus on both inwards and outwards collaboration in a team/organization is the key differentiating factor. We feel that current apps are intra-organizational oriented. But we will give teams the ability to switch context between intra and extra-organizational collaboration.

[skewart]

You have a really great insight about teams often wasting lots of time and effort because people don't really know what other people are working on. I've experienced this myself and I would love to find a solution. I started reading your post with a lot of excitement.

That said, I don't have a clear idea about how you are going to actually solve the problem. The features you describe - laying out goals, tracking tasks, communicating - sound like all of the dozens of other project management and collaboration software - Asana, Ah-ha, JIRA, etc. There are tons of these apps, and none of them quite solve the problem. They might have decent small businesses, but none are really blowing up. How is your product different? And, how are you going to break into this very crowded market?

[konoufo]

First, thank you for your interest. We have had firsthand experience of this problem ourselves. We're clearly not alone in this. Now about our approach.

As you said tools like Asana are about project management and collaboration on a clear fixed project, xCollabr is more about linking potential collaborators. Which means that, every person in a team can talk about what they're doing and make it available in the scope of say "all the teams in this organization" e.g i can say that i'm currently starting xCollabr and i'll use some A.I. techniques to do this or that. He can do the same for pieces of conversations, pieces of meetings and make them available to a broader audience.

Now teams or organisations as a whole can also tell what they're working on or plan to work on and make it available to say similar organizations in the network.

An example on student organizations : Undergraduate entrepreneurship club on campus organize a pitch night week 5 of the term. Later MBA students want to organize a pitch night at week 8 , we can suggest collaboration so that both teams can sync and organize one big pitch night.

This is really a simple example. But it explains well how we go about collaboration differently. No other products provide an interface for teams to form an ecosystem where teams can collaborate with other teams.

Did you check pur mockup/wireframe ? it should also help getting a feel of what it'd look like. https://moqups.com/[e-mail]/HbtBvliq

[mhkane]

I am interested to hear more. I think I have a vague understanding of the problem but can you clarify your solution ? I am still a bit confused about what you mean by "cross-pollination of ideas and practices while enforcing various levels of privacy". Maybe providing an example will also be helpful.

[konoufo]

Thanks for your interest. Please refer to my answer to stewark, it explains that part.

But i can add that privacy handling can be a barrier to collaboration. Then finding a balance between scopes of knowledge or ideas/plans sharing is important so as not to annihilate collaborating potential losing efficiency/time/money but still be able to choose whom we share things with. xCollabr should enable teams to do just that.

For example: A team working on hydroponics culture in New York can share their current ideas/pratices with all teams they've connected with on the platform, or "all teams working in AI in New York" , things like that.

Here sharing means "make discoverable". So that when someone's is using xCollabr, he can only see or search through what he's allowed access to. That way many teams can find complementarities in their plans/approach and start a deep collaboration on something.

[mhkane]

Oh I see, it's actually a very good concept. I started a bunch of organizations on my campus and using that I could have easily learnt from other organizations what worked/didn't work instead of re-discovering everything by myself. Nice !

[konoufo]

A sketch is available here: https://moqups.com/[e-mail]/HbtBvliq